Author: dlende

Wednesday Round Up #62

This week it’s packed – some great stuff up front, plenty on the anthro and the brain sides, art/learning/research and video games, and finally advice if you’re starting out tenure-track.

Top of the List

Research Digest, It’s Those Voodoo Correlations Again … Brain Imagers Accused of “Double Dipping”
More methods problems for imaging researchers – using the same data twice, first to find the area and then to show that area is really the one responsible for whatever hypothesis is at stake. For more commentary, see Neuroskeptic, Mind Hacks, and Newsweek

Chris Patil & Vivian Siegel, This Revolution Will Be Digitized: Online Tools for Radical Collaboration
A hive mind of creative intellects beyond institutional and geographical constraints… Sandy at the Mouse Trap both reacts and provides a condensed version in Science 2.0: What Is and What Needs to Be

Michelle Chen, Color-Blinders: Race, Genes and Justice
Are we post-racial when it comes to inequality? If only. Michelle reacts to William Saletan’s Slate piece, Mental Segregation: Inequality, Racism and Framing

Dave Munger, How Are Numbers Related to Your Body Movements? Depends on How You Read Words
Recognizing numbers, reacting with your hands, and the impact of culture – it’s SNARC in action

Jessica Palmer, Why Has Science Been Neglecting to Study Sin?
The geography of lust and the other deadly delights. See all the maps at Gene Expression. And the original article appeared in the Las Vegas Sun.

Alan Kazdin & Carlo Rotella, The Messy Room Dilemma
Coping with kids and their behavior (i.e., holding onto illusions of changing them) – ideas about reinforcement and advice on “when to ignore behavior, when to change it” from Slate

Anthropology

L.L. Wynn, Making Ethics Training Ethnography Friendly
Great discussion over at Culture Matters of many pertinent issues related to ethnographic methods, ethical work, and human subjects review

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Two Cultures Conference

two-cultures
This Saturday May 9th, The New York Academy of Sciences will host the conference The Two Cultures in the 21st Century. Co-sponsors include Science & the City, Science Communication Consortium, and ScienceDebate 2008.

The conference will pick up the debate initiated by C.P. Snow in 1959, that an inseparable gulf has opened between the sciences and the humanities and that we are the worse off because of that.

The main keynote speaker 50 years later is E.O Wilson, the evolutionary biologist and author of Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (otherwise known as unification on science and evolution’s terms). To add substance to the conference, we have former congressman John Porter and Segway inventor Dean Kamen.

I’ve actually heard EO Wilson speak, it’s well-worth it. And there are plenty of other presenters that day, including Kenneth Miller, author of Finding Darwin’s God; Science Friday’s Ira Flatow, and science journalist Carl Zimmer. You can see the full list of invited speakers – definitely heavy weights in science and communication, which might be a better name for the conference. How to get science across to the public is one of the main concerns of most of them.

You can still register; the conference is being held at the New York Academy of Sciences in downtown Manhattan.

For those of you actually interested in CP Snow, Peter Dizikies had an illumating essay Our Two Cultures on Snow’s ideas and how they have stood the test of time back in March. And by coincidence, Stanley Fish just wrote God Talk in today’s Think Again, where he asks if belief in science is more irrational than belief in God, or more broadly, questioning our reliance on “science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation” for guidance on what to do.

Cynthia Mahmood and Political Violence

Cynthia Mahmood is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and a great colleague of mine. She is also now a star on YouTube. Here Cynthia explains how she approaches understanding political violence as an anthropologist:

About six minutes in, Cynthia discusses the present case of Pakistan, and expounds further in a press release accompanying the video, U.S. must help calm nuclear-armed Pakistan.

“Right now, we’re finally seeing that the heartland of the region’s instability, in fact, is in Pakistan, and that the problem President Obama is having to deal with is not just what to do about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but what to do about the very serious and urgent danger that a nuclear-armed nation is on the verge of either collapse or takeover by radical Islamists.”

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Wednesday Round Up #61

So after the favs, it’s some evolution (hobbits and phalluses, anyone?), then anthro and neuro, onto education and finishing off with some stuff on Colombia. Enjoy!

Top of the List
fibroblast-and-nanowires
Courtney Humphries, Untangling the Brain: From Neuron to Mind
Feature article from Harvard Magazine which addresses the question, “how do individual neurons link to one another in networks that somehow result in complex brain functions?”
The striking picture at right leads off the article, and shows a human fibroblast on a bed of nanowires. They also have some good online videos about simple creatures and how they navigate the world.

Roberto Casati, Book Review: The Art Instinct by Dennis Dutton
Culture & Cognition takes on the claims of art by evolution while preserving sympathy for the overall evolutionary effort. For the fun version, see Colbert’s interview with Dutton – art for propagation!

Heather Tompkins, Derek Albeck
Street Art! Skulls meets urban portraiture! Hat-tip to Sue!

The Neurocritic, Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion and Envy and Schadenfreude
Both critical and informative on the blow-up of novel research and media sensationalism

Declan Butler, Web Usage Data Outline Map of Knowledge
Pdf of a recent Nature News piece – here’s what impressed me about this take on the PLoS paper, “A striking difference in the usage maps is that journals in the humanities and social sciences figure much more prominently than in citation-based maps. Along with journals in some other fields, such as psychology and the environment, they also emerge as gateways between clusters that are otherwise poorly connected, and so act as key bridges between disciplines.”

Evolution

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Anthropology on Cambridge DSpace

dspace-anthropology
One of our readers, Laurence (thanks!), pointed out a great resource yesterday, Cambridge DSpace (Digital Space), the university’s “institutional repository… to facilitate the deposit of digital content of a scholarly or heritage nature.”

Laurence sent us the link for all the video lectures and other materials under “Department of Social Anthropology” at Cambribge. These resources include interviews with a wide range of scholars, from Paul Rabinow to Colin Renfrew and Simon Schaeffer and many others. This section shows 471 results, so plenty to explore.

There is a whole range of intellectual communities on Cambridge DSpace, from horse paleopathology (only 1 item, but still I had to mention it!) to the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre. The Department of Economics has their collection of working papers up, including this 2004 one on bounded rationality and neural networks. But it really seems that the Department of Social Anthropology has taken the greatest advantage of DSpace, so go explore.